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 Ice
Cube 
 "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he
wants is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous
in fact, but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure
in the grand eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle.
Pyongyang isn't even in the Bible!" "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to
our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with
explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be
upon him. "
 "'When
it comes to learning from its mistakes, corporate America has
fallen off the rehab wagon more times than Robert Downey, Jr.
A quick glance at last week's papers reveals that it's monkey
business as usual on Wall Street."
 "'People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in, and
now they have to realize that they can actually create that
world and fight for the things that are worth fighting for
and not feel apathetic. We are all going to die. There is
no point in holding anything back. ."
 "For
white people, it will be very different. They will be advised
to refer to the U.S. Federal Standard 595B Color Chart (or
the Ralph Lauren color chip guide at Home Depot) to determine
the range of colors permissible in a potential spouse."
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by Ross Levine Admiral Poindexter and his Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, have struck again, and I'm willing to place my bet that every pundit in the United States is, at this very moment, pounding their keyboards in rapturous response. As if they even have to bother. In this case, a government agency has come up with something so patently moronic that it satirizes itself with absolutely no help from the art of our ever-watchful gadflies. In fact, the harebrained scheme -- along with half a million of our tax dollars -- has already bitten the dust, thanks to two Democratic whistle-blowers -- Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota -- who yesterday denounced the entire venture in Congress. But in case you missed this blip on the radar of the ridiculous, here it is in a veritable nutshell: The Pentagon had introduced a Web site, www.policyanalysismarket.org, where, beginning October 1, speculators would have been able to anonymously bet on the likelihood of future terrorist acts such as political assassinations, regime overthrows (if only the site had been operational before we left for Baghdad!) and heinous acts of terrorism. To paraphrase Senator Wyden's explanation, if, let's say, you suspected that someone was about to plug a bullet into the brain of a certain world leader, you would place your bet and then hope that lots of other gambling clairvoyants would also place their money on that same bullet, thus driving up the value of the potential pay-off. Then, if you were lucky enough, and the world leader's cortex did indeed get splattered on the back window of his or her limousine, you would rake in the winnings before the gore was even dry. The idea -- if we may use so flattering a term -- was that the Pentagon would monitor the site and the betting, and thus get a jump on terrorist acts to come. After all, as the theory goes (and never mind the whole dot.com fiasco), if people are willing to put money on something, they must have a pretty good idea what they're doing.
Only one small problem. Given that the bettors remain anonymous, what would have stopped our pals Al and Qaeda from depositing half the Saudi treasury on the likelihood of the Brooklyn Bridge being blown up, and then doing their darndest to make sure they collect? It could have started a bidding war so intense that even groups like, for instance, the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the PTA might have wanted a piece of the pie, giving them a powerful incentive to join the Axis of Evil. Of course, you say, Admiral Poindexter would have spotted the feeding frenzy and immediately asked that troops be dispatched to Brooklyn, but that could have been a turn of events the high rollers at Al Qaeda would have already considered. They could then have sailed a jet into the George Washington Bridge instead, sacrificing their wagers (and a few more martyrs) but scoring yet another stunning victory against the Great Satan. Now if this were just the braindead-child of Admiral Poindexter, our shock and awe would be fleeting at most. After all, Poindexter and the dudes at DARPA have come up with winners before, most notably Total Information Awareness, or TIA, a (fortunately) transient ischemic attack on our civil liberties involving the development of a gargantuan computer system able to sift through all the electronic data in the land in pursuit of terror plots and, one presumes, any potentially "un-American" activities (interpreted broadly, I'm sure) that might also happen to turn up. And Poindexter, along with Ollie North, was one of the select few who managed to scuff Ronald Reagan's teflon finish when he resigned as the latter's national security advisor during the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-'80s; that's when, in order to get our hostages back, we sold weapons to the Ayatollah and used the proceeds to secretly fund right-wing guerillas in Nicaragua. But the terrorist crapshoot under discussion here was being funded by the Department of Defense, to the tune of $8 million dollars, had it lasted two years instead of two minutes, and one has to wonder if this is what George Bush meant when he said it was our money and not the government's. It's one thing to implement sensible, even costly, programs to increase national security and prevent another September 11, but it's another to place the nation's survival in the hands of loose cannons like Poindexter who have already misfired and will undoubtedly do so again.
Bush has tried a few times (to no avail, thankfully) to revive the career of Dr. Strangelove himself, Henry Kissinger, but if the President or any in his cabinet signed off on this boondoggle -- putting our hard-earned money into a futures market based on murders yet to be -- well, maybe those massive tax cuts weren't such a bad idea after all. The U.S. government has come up with plenty of doozies in the past -- studying black people as they died untreated from syphilis, testing atom bombs downwind of civilian populations, spraying our own soldiers with Agent Orange -- so what's a little Pentagon Ponzi scheme like this one? Well, some of us would like to assume that America's war on terrorism is no laughing matter, but first the Administration needs to get one thing through its ever-thickening skull. This is not America's war on terrorism; terrorism threatens the security and stability of the entire world. How would we react to a program established by a foreign government that would have its citizens anteing up on the odds of George Bush being assassinated, Dick Cheney kidnapped and tortured, and the Washington metro flushed out with Sarin? We seem to think -- or at least our current leadership does -- that the world is a game board and, now that the Soviets are out, we're the only ones pushing the pieces around. We tried that in Iraq, and now our soldiers are being picked off while we wait to see if the rest of the world might possibly lend a hand. It's difficult to admit that, throughout our history, America has herself often behaved like a terrorist entity, participating directly and indirectly in political assassinations and the propping up of cruel, despotic regimes. For us to pay a crackpot like Poindexter to turn world politics into a Vegas sport is almost an insult to those whose lives were ended or shattered on September 11. If we're going to do something about terrorism, then we should at least do something that might help. 29 July 03 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is.
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